Welcome to DBSTalk

Welcome to DBSTalk. Our community covers all aspects of video delivery solutions including: Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS), Cable Television, and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV). We also have forums to discuss popular television programs, home theater equipment, and internet streaming service providers. Members of our community include experts who can help you solve technical problems, industry professionals, company representatives, and novices who are here to learn.

Like most online communities you must register to view or post in our community. Sign-up is a free and simple process that requires minimal information. Be a part of our community by signing in or creating an account. The Digital Bit Stream starts here!

I am betting that you can just use an internal log device for the xfs partition. I ended up making partition 1 smaller, and modifying some of the parameters to make it look more like the filesysystem that the directv hd-dvr creates.

Let him do that experiment, we will know soon how it would be finished. Perhaps he is smart enough to fight with 'black box' - DTV's Linux flavor.
If he will find a solution, that would benefit all prospective DVR owners.

I would add to that tests - try to stick close to DVR partitioning as you could, usually ppl who wrote internal verification 'correct-incorrect', included tight control of sizes/boundaries/parameters of mkfs. If some bit is off - whole disk will be repartitioned and formatted.

FYI, my previous post appears to have worked and my DVR is functioning with the EARS drive.

I couldn't really return the drive where I bought it and I didn't really trust adding it to my MDADM raid as I don't really trust this early adoption drive. I suspect that in the coming months, we will begin to see less of the 512byte drives and more of the 4kib drives. Hope these posts are able to help someone out.

Let him do that experiment, we will know soon how it would be finished. Perhaps he is smart enough to fight with 'black box' - DTV's Linux flavor.If he will find a solution, that would benefit all prospective DVR owners.

I would add to that tests - try to stick close to DVR partitioning as you could, usually ppl who wrote internal verification 'correct-incorrect', included tight control of sizes/boundaries/parameters of mkfs. If some bit is off - whole disk will be repartitioned and formatted.

I would not blame this on the writers of the internal partitioning scheme, this hard-drive does not report the correct sector size via hdparam which is why linux has trouble with this drive. I suppose a firmware update could fix this, though i doubt we will see this from WD and only the next gen will be correct.

I have started to notice lagging in the Menu of the DVR. I think I am ready to give up and have ordered the WD 2TB EADS model. Perhaps I will create a partition on my EARS model to use as a spare drive in my mdadm raid.

Does anyone know what directv puts on the first partition? I am going to try an experiment of 4kib aligning partition 1 (517 MB partition) when upgrading to my 2TB drive to see if that is causing the menu lags.

From what I can gather, partition 2 is the xfs data partition and partition 3 is the real time device partition.

ok, then this drive might just work. I have already aligned partition 2 and 3 by manually creating them. If I move partition 1 to start 1 sector later, it should also be 4 kib aligned. I am not sure what the RAM specs of the HR21 are, but this could explain the laggy menu, if it requires going to swap often.

Need help please. I've tried the copy from my HR20-700 to a WD20EADS drive several times and get an error message at the same point every time. I don't have SATA 0 port on my pc so I used SATA 1 port which has the HDD to the computer and the next one on the board is SATA 2. Do I need to enter different command prompts if not using SATA 0? Gpart shows the devices properly. Here are some screen shots up to the error.

So after fighting with this for about a week now and letting it run overnight with no success, it is finally copying.

I didn't realize for all my failures that the hdd activity light wasn't on, realizing that the copy was hung (for hours). When I hit control C it only showed that about 7 mb was dumped. Nowhere close to the 500gb file.

I tried with the following:0.5.1-1 gparted CD with sata->achi in the bios with no luck, 0.5.1-1 gparted CD with sata->native IDE in the bios with no luck0.4.6-1 gparted CD with sata->legacy IDE in the bios and it is now working!!

Not sure if it is the gparted version or the translation of the sata drives. On all three, gparted detected the drives, just refused to copy on the first two.

Hope this helps someone else out.

I can confirm I just had the same problem. I was attempting to copy from a 1TB drive to another of the same size and after an overnight run it still didn't complete. No LED's on these drives to tell what was happening, although they were cool to the touch so I suspect there was no data transfer going on! I restarted the copy and added the -p but it didn't change anything (no progress reports). I noticed each time after canceling it seems to only report completing about 10mb. This was with GPARTED 0.5.2-1

So based on the suggestions here, I downgraded to 0.4.6-1 and voila, it seems to have started working (at least it is reporting progress whereas before it wasn't). No changes to the BIOS setup. A 84% full 1TB drive is on track to take 6.5 hours (based on the current progress). This is about 35MB/s assuming 840GB data which seems right.

The lesson of the story is to use the older version of GPARTED to do this job.

[BA whole bunch of stuff will scroll on the screen and the last thing it will say is restoring non-directory files.

12. You wait. Patience is a virtue. It will sit at this screen for a long time as it copies the files. There is no progress bar. Overall time will vary depending on how full your drive was. My buddy’s drive had 3% free. It took 2 hours and 45 minutes to copy all the data. You’ll feel a little reassured looking at the hard drive LEDs, knowing that something is actually happening.

OK, made to the restoring non-directory files without a hitch.

Then nothing. No HDD LED's, no drive noise, nothing. Both drives are 1.5G and this was a practice run. One drive had about 10 hours on it, the other had 5 minutes so I would know for sure which drive copied since both were the same size. Let it process overnight for over 16 hours. Nothing.

Any suggestions?

Edit: OK, loaded up 0.4.6-1 instead of 0.5.2-1. Worked great except one thing I was not expecting. I kept the shows on both drives. The 10 hours copied over, but the 5 minutes was still there and watchable.

So now that I have it working, tomorrow night I do it for real on my 750G to 1.5T drives.

Update: This morning I tried to get it started before I had to leave, but kept getting a restore error. Didn't have time to mess with it, so I left. But kept thinking. I had used the large drive in another DVR testing the concept before I tried on a drive with my content. So I wondered if that had something to do with my restore issue. So I came home at lunch and rebooted my HR20 with the new drive and did a full reset. Once it booted back up, I did the graceful shutdown and tried again.

Success. Everything went like it was supposed to and shortly after I got home this evening, I had a fully copied drive and all my shows played. Now have 60% free instead of 12%. That should do me for a while.

The interesting thing is the old drive, which I had to previously remove from a Free Agent Pro enclosure and put in an MX-1, was HOT. Almost too hot to touch. My new WD drive was warm, but no where near the temp of the Seagate. No wonder those FAP's failed if those drives run that hot out in the open.